21 Things We Learned from the FBI Notes on Clinton's
Email

By Sarah Westwood
WashingtonExaminer.com

Notes from the FBI's year-long investigation of
Hillary Clinton's private email network offer fresh
insight into the steps the former secretary of state
and her team took to conceal their records from the
public.

The 58 pages released Friday call into question many
of Clinton's public statements about her server and
prompted renewed criticism of the FBI's decision to
close the investigation without recommending
criminal charges for anyone involved.

While Clinton's campaign downplayed the presence of
any new information in the FBI notes, the following
21 details were unknown before the report was made
public.

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FBI agents indicated they were never able to
determine whether they had all of Clinton's emails
because none of her staff could remember where the
original universe of records was located.

A witness whose name was redacted gave the FBI three
different answers over the course of several
interviews about where he collected the emails
before turning select ones over to the government.

After his "inconsistent statements" failed to shed
light on the location of the total email universe,
agents used "forensic analysis" to search for the
stash.

They never found it, nor did they determine the
"composition" of the group of emails Clinton
withheld.

...because they got lost in the mail

Clinton's unedited trove of emails existed in only
one place: a laptop from the Clinton Foundation that
was provided by Justin Cooper, one of the technology
aides who oversaw the server system.

In spring 2013, Cooper instructed Clinton's
assistant to archive all of Clinton's emails on the
foundation's laptop and give it to Clinton. However,
the assistant told the FBI she forgot to give the
laptop to Clinton.

When reminded of that a year later, she deleted the
laptop — but did not wipe it — at the instruction of
the firm then responsible for managing Clinton's
emails and told the FBI she mailed it to the
Democratic nominee.

Clinton's staff said they never got the laptop and
speculated that it must have gotten "lost" before it
reached their office.

Why Clinton's IT aide needed immunity
Bryan Pagliano, the information technology aide who
built the server Clinton used for most of her
tenure, told the FBI he knew the system might be
used to transmit classified materials at the time he
set it up.

Pagliano's involvement in the case drew attention
last year following the Justice Department's
decision to grant him immunity in order to speak
about the server.

The FBI did not elaborate on that deal in its
investigative summary.

But it did reveal the fact that Pagliano was aware
of the risks associated with Clinton's private email
network and of numerous attempts over the years to
breach that network.

An unidentified individual told Pagliano in 2009
that "he would not be surprised if classified
information was being transmitted to Clinton's
personal server."

Clinton's team lost all 13 mobile devices

Far from using just one mobile device to access all
of her private emails for "convenience," Clinton and
her aides may have logged onto the
"clintonemail.com" network from 13 different
devices.

In fact, she cycled through eight Blackberry phones
during her tenure as secretary of state.

Clinton also may have used five different iPads to
use her private email account. FBI agents said they
received just three of those.

Her staff could not find any of the 13 cell phones
when the investigation began, however.

Staff destroyed phones with a hammer

Aides told the FBI they could not remember what
happened to most of Clinton's Blackberries, but in
two cases, they said IT staffer Justin Cooper broke
the phones when Clinton had finished using them.

"Cooper said he did recall two instances where he
destroyed Clinton's old mobile devices by breaking
them in half or hitting them with a hammer," the
notes said.

Clinton claimed she got no classification
training

When pressed by investigators about whether she
realized the information in hundreds of her emails
was classified, Clinton said she could not name a
single example of how a document becomes classified.

She told FBI agents she could not remember ever
receiving training on how to handle classified
material, despite the fact that she signed her name
to a form agreeing to the proper treatment of
sensitive records.

Clinton's longtime assertion that nothing in her
inbox was marked classified fell apart in July when
FBI Director James Comey first revealed that three
emails bearing "confidential" markings had passed
through her server.

In an interview with the FBI, Clinton said she
thought the "C" in those three emails had been a way
to alphabetize paragraphs and denied ever
recognizing it as a classified marking.

Bill Clinton's office got classified emails

Agents discovered hundreds of emails were sent to an
unidentified individual on the
"presidentclinton.com" network.

That was the network originally set up on the server
system in the basement of the Clintons' Chappaqua,
N.Y., home when Hillary Clinton decided to shift her
communications there at the outset of her State
Department tenure.

According to the report, Huma Abedin, then Hillary
Clinton's deputy chief of staff, forwarded
classified emails to Bill Clinton's staff in order
to print them.

Staff sent classified emails while overseas

Although Hillary Clinton and her aides were informed
of the cyberthreats their inboxes faced when
traveling abroad, they still sent classified
information over their private network during
overseas travel.

"Clinton and her immediate staff were notified of
foreign travel risks and were warned that digital
threats began immediately upon landing in a foreign
country," the FBI report noted.

The full number of classified emails transmitted
during foreign trips was redacted.

Hillary Clinton emailed Obama while overseas

Despite the risks about cybervulnerabilities in
other countries, Hillary Clinton emailed President
Obama while traveling abroad.

She stated she had asked for a secure Blackberry
upon arriving at the State Department after learning
that Obama used one in the White House.

Powell warned about private email use

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly attempted to justify
her private email use by noting that Colin Powell, a
fellow former secretary of state, used one as well.

She even suggested Powell had advised her to do so
in the early months of her tenure.

But the FBI indicated Powell had in fact warned
Hillary Clinton about the perils of using private
email accounts, urging her to "be very careful" and
to share few details about whatever network she used
with the public should her personal email use become
common knowledge.

A concussion blurred Hillary Clinton's
memory

FBI agents asked the former secretary of state if
she was advised on the proper method of turning over
federal records to the government toward the end of
her time at the State Department.

Hillary Clinton said she had suffered a concussion
and then a blood clot toward the end of 2012 and
therefore couldn't remember all the briefings she
received during that period.

Aides said they didn't know the server
existed

Even though Hillary Clinton's closest aides —
Abedin, Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan — made up 68
percent of the former secretary of state's email
traffic, they told FBI agents they did not know the
private server existed.

Instead, the aides said they only learned of its
existence when media reports about the server began
to surface last year.

Emails were scrubbed after the scandal began

Hillary Clinton's private email use first became
public knowledge in March 2015 following a New York
Times report on the arrangement.

Shortly afterward, employees at Platte River
Networks, a firm tapped to manage the network,
applied a digital deletion tool called BleachBit to
the server to erase old emails.

The Platte River Networks staff did so in violation
of a preservation order from the House Select
Committee on Benghazi, which was then pursuing
Hillary Clinton's emails about Benghazi.

One unnamed employee told the FBI that he was aware
of the order to save any potentially relevant emails
when he made the deletions in March 2015, but chose
to make them anyway.

Hillary Clinton withheld almost 17,500
emails

Beyond the trove of records Hillary Clinton's staff
hand-picked for the State Department, the Democratic
nominee withheld 17,448 emails.

The FBI did not specify how many of those records
were personal in nature. However, agents did say
that at least some of those emails were
work-related.

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly insisted that she
handed over everything that could have possibly been
related to her government work when she submitted
roughly 30,000 emails in late 2014.

Eighty-one email chains were classified when
written

Contrary to her claim that nothing on her server was
classified at the time it was put there, Hillary
Clinton transmitted 81 classified email chains on
her network.
Her staff withheld 12 of those classified chains
from the State Department and the FBI. The others
were included in the original batch of 30,000
emails.

Eight of the email chains were classified at the
"top secret" level when they were written.

In total, 2,093 emails from the "clintonemail.com"
network have been either retroactively classified or
were considered classified from the start.

Hillary Clinton personally discussed top
secret intel

Hillary Clinton spent most of her interview with the
FBI blaming the presence of classified materials in
her inbox on the foreign service officers and other
government staffers who sent her the emails,
claiming she simply relied on the judgement of other
officials.

But the FBI discovered she had personally emailed
top secret-level intelligence in four separate
chains with other State Department officials.

In three additional chains, she discussed
"secret"-level information, and emailed confidential
information in four more chains.

At least one witness knew what was happening

One witness, whose name was redacted, acknowledged
the fact that classified information was circulating
on the unsecured network when he spoke to the FBI.

That witness admitted that information discussed
over the email system "was technically probably
classified" but told the FBI that "you can't do
business that way," if they were to confine
conversations to classified channels.

Aides cited the need to coordinate quickly on
sensitive matters when stories were developing in
the media, especially when senior-level officials
like Hillary Clinton could not get to a SCIF — an
area designed for the viewing of classified
intelligence — in time to handle the issue.

A separate witness told the FBI he had read news
articles suggesting the information in Clinton's
emails had been over-classified but stated upon
reading the emails during his interview that he "now
understood why people were concerned about this
matter."

Hillary Clinton withheld emails to Sidney
Blumenthal

During her interview with the FBI, Hillary Clinton
described the dozens of intelligence memos provided
to her by Sidney Blumenthal, an informal adviser, as
"journalistic" missives from a friend.

The FBI said it identified 179 such memos that
Blumenthal had written to Hillary Clinton. That
figure included two memos that Clinton did not
provide to the State Department.

Agents recovered those two emails off "Blackberry
backups" turned over by Cooper.

The server was hacked

FBI DIrector James Comey said in July that his
agents found no evidence that Hillary Clinton's
personal inbox had been hacked, although he added
that the FBI would not expect to find evidence in
the event that a breach did occur.
But at least one attack on the server appeared to
succeed during Hillary Clinton's tenure, the FBI
report noted.

Agents described "a successful compromise of an
e-mail account on the server" on Jan. 13.

What's more, the FBI said the "clintonemail.com"
domain saw a spike in cyberattacks following the New
York Times story that revealed the existence of the
server system.

Hillary Clinton's SCIF was not secure

The areas inside Hillary Clinton's homes in
Washington, D.C., and Chappaqua that were designed
for the secure viewing of classified material, known
as SCIFS, were not used properly by the former
secretary of state and her staff.

For example, the FBI said Hillary Clinton sometimes
left the door of her Washington SCIF open so Abedin
could come and go as she pleased. Investigators said
her Chappaqua SCIF was "not always secure" either,
as three different aides had "routine access" to the
area.

The FBI also discovered that Hillary Clinton
frequently brought her personal BlackBerry into the
SCIF at her State Department office in clear
violation of protocol.